Late update:
There has been a major relocation of ABC Studios to the East Valley.
Disney has relocated ABC network employees from New York and
from the Century City site to a new building on the Disney
Studiolot in Burbank. Neither Disney
nor ABC will own or reside in the Century City towers any longer, making
Burbank the official headquarters of the American Broadcasting Company.

Meanwhile, a brand
new studio was built in Glendale (on the Burbank border) for the local
ABC affiliate, KABC-TV (Channel 7). It is located at 500 Circle Seven Drive,
just a short drive east of the Disney lot, in an aging industrial section
of Glendale, near the DreamWorks
animation studio and Disney's own existing 'Imagineering' headquarters.
Disney announced that it would create a 125-acre campus there with dozens
of new buildings, sound stages and a high-tech business center, including
the new offices for Channel 7 adjoining the site.

KABC/Channel 7 moved
to their new television studios and vacated the Vitagraph/ABC lot in December
2000. ABC (the Network) will continue to tape "General Hospital"
and "Port Charles" here on the lot. Disney will use the remaining
sound stages for feature films since they have run out of room on their
Burbank lot.

As for the ABC Entertainment
Center, it has recently been announced that the Center will be razed, and
replaced by a new $280 million office building (with no connection to ABC).
This will also mean the destruction of the well-known Shubert Theatre.

I will be doing a new page soon on the new ABC headquarters in Burbank.
Stay tuned...

In the meantime,
I'll leave up the former page, for anyone who's interested in reading it.
But remember that it was written when the two ABC centers were still in
use.

Currently, ABC has two
facilitiesin Los Angeles.

The first, containing
their corporate offices, is located in Century City's posh ABC
Entertainment Center. The second is the ABC
Television Center, located east of Hollywood; this is their studio
base for KABC, the local Channel 7, an ABC affiliate. ABC does not offer
a guided tour of the studio, and it is not open to the public, which is
a shame, considering the studio's record in broadcasting, and the history
of its east Hollywood studio.

The 23-acre studio
lot on Prospect Avenue, which is now the ABC Television Center,
opened in 1912 as Vitagraph Studios, making it one of the oldest
studios in Hollywood.

Vitagraph was one
of the first companies to produce motion pictures in Hollywood (using Thomas
Edison's original equipment); they had come out to the west coast to escape
the bad weather in New York, back in the days of silent movies. And at
the time, it was the largest motion picture lot in the world.

Stage 55, the oldest
remaining stage on the lot (and at one time the world's largest sound stage),
still features windows that are visible in "The Phantom of the
Opera" with Lon Chaney.
The huge pepper tree in front of the KABC bungalows was planted in
1920 by Norma Talmadge.

The studio was eventually
purchased by Warner Bros. in 1925 for $1 million.And at least some portion
of Al Jolson's
historic "The Jazz Singer" may have been filmed here on
Stage 55 when the lot was owned by Warner Bros.

ABC Television acquired
the studio property in 1949, and opened the world's largest, state-of-the-art
television center.

The Beatles
played at the studio live in 1965 when they appeared on the TV show "Shindig,"
as did The Rolling Stones
and Sonny & Cher.
The very first Jerry Lewis
Telethon was filmed here. Dean Martin
debuted his new song "That's Amore" for the first time
on that show.

Over the years, a
surprising number of popular game shows were taped here at ABC, including
"Let's Make a Deal," "Family Feud," "The
Dating Game," The Match Game," "The Newlywed
Game" and "Password." So were music/variety shows
such as Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" and "The
Lawrence Welk Show."

But it is no longer
the site of many network productions. The studio houses the local ABC affiliate
station KABC-TV (Channel
7), with itspopular Eyewitness News division, as well as
the "Good Morning America" west coast headquarters.
Also, the soap operas "General Hospital" and "Port
Charles" are taped here - the large five-story building (visible
in the photo to the left) is devoted exclusively to the production of "General
Hospital."

Current plans call
for KABC to build a new 100,000-foot studio in Burbank soon (near
its parent corporation, Disney),
which should be ready sometime in 2000. The new studio will be located
in the Grand Central Business Centre (owned by Disney), at 512 Paula Ave.,
near the interchange of Interstate 5 and California 134. It will share
the Centre with such existing Disney branches as Disney Imagineering, Disney
Interactive, and will be right across the street from the new 12-acre DreamWorks
animation studio.

After the move, the old Prospect Avenue
studio be used "to expand other network programs and develop future
projects."

Two TV shows used these distinctive
twin 44-story towers and the fountains at the ABC Entertainment Center
as settings for their fictional detective agencies: "Remington Steele"
(with Pierce Brosnan,
in his pre-007 days) and "Moonlighting" (with Cybill Shepard& Bruce Willis
- in the days before Bruce became an action hero.)

TheAmerican Broadcasting Company (ABC)
started out as the junior member of the Big Three TV networks in the early
days of television. But over the years ABC grew to become a major player.

During
the 1950's and 1960's, ABC achieved only limited success in denting the
Top 15 list (of most popular shows for those decades), scoring only a few
times, with "The Real McCoys," "Disneyland"
and "Bewitched." But other ABC shows, such as "The
Mickey Mouse Club," "Leave It to Beaver," "The
Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet," "The Untouchables,"
"The Donna Reed Show," "The Addams Family,"
"The Partridge Family" and "American Bandstand"
also did well.

But
the 1970's was a breakthrough decade for ABC, when
the network took the TV world by storm with such popular sitcoms as "Happy
Days," "Laverne &Shirley," "Three's
Company" and "Mork & Mindy," as well as with
romantic adventure shows like "Charlie's Angels," "Hart
to Hart," "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy
Island" - not to mention NFL Monday Night Football.

It
was during nightly coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 that
"Nightline" with Ted Koppel
was born, finally giving ABC a way to compete head to head with NBC's formidable
"Tonight Show."

During the 80's,
ABC gave us "Who's the Boss?," "Moonlighting,"
"Dynasty" and "Thirtysomething," while
in the 90's ABC they offered up "Twin Peaks," "Lois
& Clark," "Ellen" and "The Wonder
Years." ABC has also given us some of the best miniseries ever
made, including "Rich Man, Poor Man," "The Winds
of War" and the unforgettable saga, "Roots."

Today,
ABC has climbed out of a recent slump a little in the ratings department,
with the help of Regis Philbin's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,"
and recent hits such as "Home Improvement," "Grace
Under Fire," "Spin City," and "Boy Meets
World," and with current sitcoms such as "Sabrina the
Teenage Witch," "Dharma & Greg"
and "Drew Carey." plus dramas like "NYPD Blue"
and "The Practice." Also among the network's top-rated
shows have been their news programs,
such as "PrimeTime Live" "20/20,"
the ABC Evening News with Peter
Jennings, and the always popular NFL Monday
Night football games.

In
July of 1995, ABC was bought by the Walt Disney Company, and word
has it that ABC is shopping around for a new location for their main television
studio. Since the purchase, some of their programming has taken a distinctive
Disney turn, including the return of "The Wonderful World of Disney"
on Sunday nights

Although NBC
Studios (in the Valley) and CBS TV
City (in Hollywood) both invite the public in to watch live tapings
as members of a live studio audience, that's not the case with ABC. Other
than the local Eyewitness News broadcasts and soap operas (such as "General
Hospital"), no ABC television shows are currently produced at
either ABC Television City or the ABC Entertainment Center. All
ABC shows are done "out" - that is, they are taped at other studios,
then aired on ABC.

There was one notable
exception recently. Several segments of "The View" (the
early morning talk show with Barbara Walters)
were taped before a live studio audience at the ABC Television Center,
but the show has now returned to its regular home in New York.

In order to watch
an ABC show being taped, you'll have to contact one of the audience services
(such as "Audiences
Unlimited") for tickets, and then go to another studio to
see the show being taped. (See the separate pages about getting tickets
to live tapings.)

Getting
there: The ABC Television Center
is located to the east of central Hollywood, on Prospect Avenue (about
half a mile to the northeast of KCET Studios). / From Hollywood &
Vine, go east on Hollywood Boulevard (about two miles), to just past
Barnsdall Park (and just before Vermont Avenue), where Hollywood Boulevard
takes a sharp right (southeast) turn. At this point, don't follow Hollywood
Boulevard. Instead, go straight ahead (east) on Prospect Avenue. Follow
Prospect Avenue east for about five more blocks, and ABC Studios will be
on your left (north) side, just past Talmadge Street.

To
reach the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City from Hollywood
&Vine, take Vine Street south (about 3/4 of a mile) to
Santa Monica Boulevard. Turn right (west) on Santa Monica Boulevard and
follow it west/southwest (for about eight miles) to the Avenue of the Stars.
Turn left (south) on Avenue of the stars and go straight ahead to the towering
fountains in the center of the street. The Entertainment Center will be
on your left (east) side, across from the Century
Plaza Hotel.

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with any business described in the article above, and does not constitute
an
endorsement of this or any other business. The photos of celebrities on
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